Engine Yard, the leading Platform as a Service (PaaS), today announced that it is further enhancing its multi-cloud capabilities with support for Windows Azure. With this new offering, Engine Yard continues to drive innovation in cloud application development by providing a flexible and modular architecture, with greater choice of infrastructure. Through their strategic alliance, Engine Yard and Microsoft are delivering a commercial grade, open source based platform on top of on-demand infrastructure that is ideal for developers and IT professionals at start-ups, small and mid-sized businesses, and large, global enterprises.

"Engine Yard continues to be on the leading edge of cloud innovation, fundamentally changing the way companies plan, build, deploy and manage apps," said Bill Platt, senior vice president of operations at Engine Yard. "We look forward to working with Windows Azure to deliver a joint cloud solution that empowers developers to more easily and quickly deliver modern apps using open source technologies on enterprise-ready infrastructure."

Engine Yard is delivering on its multi-cloud vision by bringing its automation and orchestration, as well as its deep expertise in open source cloud application development frameworks, to Windows Azure, enabling enterprises to quickly and easily deploy apps. With this offering, the company also is providing an enhanced and modern user interface, as well as advancements in its new cluster model -- supporting applications, databases and load balancers -- for faster provisioning, configuration and deployment.

The Engine Yard and Microsoft strategic alliance will give developers more choice for cloud application development -- making it easy to select a secure, compliant platform that has a range of price points and features, while also reducing the risk of relying on a single infrastructure. Enterprises, including existing Windows Azure customers, will now have access to Engine Yard, the industry-leading, commercial grade Linux platform, and its expert DevOps team, which provides comprehensive cloud support services.

"Windows Azure is committed to openness and serving developers. By working with Engine Yard, we're further enabling developers who use open source languages and frameworks to take advantage of a leading cloud application platform to create and deploy modern Web and mobile apps more easily," said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president, Windows Azure, at Microsoft. "We're pleased to offer customers a balance of automation and control when they deploy open source solutions in Linux virtual environments on Windows Azure."

"With the availability of Windows Azure on Engine Yard Cloud, we have even more choice for delivering solutions to meet our clients' diverse needs," said Michael Smith, CTO at Canvas, a digital agency in New York City. "Our clients don't have one technical persona. We've built a wide variety of premium applications -- from Facebook games up through content management systems for large enterprises. With this relationship between Engine Yard and Microsoft, we can select the best infrastructure, so we stay nimble by using the latest technology for building and deploying apps in the cloud."